Waterdrop, one of the technology platform dedicated to insurance and healthcare service with a positive social impact, has announced that it officially launched its first digital employee ‘Waterdrop Assistant’. ‘Waterdrop Assistant’ is a human-like virtual employee built on Waterdrop’s business processes and powered by a variety of technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI). ‘Waterdrop Assistant’ can assist the online insurance service team with a variety of tasks, including data processing and analysis, online user management, and customer service, thereby improving the Company’s customer service team’s response time, quality, and scope.
Mingxing Huang, Head of AI, Waterdrop, said, “The introduction of digital employees is our latest exploration to continue promoting the digital transformation of the insurance industry, to reduce operating costs, and improve the efficiency of insurance services. Specifically in our case, ‘Waterdrop Assistant’ has helped shorten the response time, lower operating costs, and unleash the potential of our staff. Our analysis shows that since its launch, ‘Waterdrop Assistant’ has processed 86% of the user sessions with a 97% accuracy rate for intention recognition, helping free up 37% of the customer service manpower and effectively increase the policy renewal rate. Currently, ‘Waterdrop Assistant’ is responsible for highly repetitive and labor-intensive tasks, however, it has also undergone constant system iterations and architecture upgrades through ongoing machine learning. For example, in the fourth quarter of 2021, Waterdrop Assistant completed 20-plus system iterations and 3 architecture upgrades accumulatively. Our next goal is to enable ‘Waterdrop Assistant’ to independently complete tasks for more complex and interactive scenarios and play a bigger role in the process of sales inquiry, underwriting review, risk control, and claim settlement.”
Huang added, Waterdrop Assistant is marketed as an ‘assistant’ to insurance service representatives. ‘Waterdrop Assistant’ has completed training in speech, sentiment recognition, semantic analysis, and other capabilities, allowing it to conduct simple communication with customers, record and collate their protection needs, intention to purchase insurance, and classify them into different groups using its intelligent dialogue robot technology. This will enable the Company’s online services team to create more timely, professional, and tailored insurance plans for various customers. In terms of online user management, ‘Waterdrop Assistant’ has significantly improved the operational refinement and efficiency of its insurance service staff, as well as its ability to interact with customer communities and maintain customer relationships independently. For example, ‘Waterdrop Assistant’ can identify customer needs according to the keywords sent by customers, send personalized push notifications, reminders of policy expirations and birthday greetings to customers in time.
Furthermore, ‘Waterdrop Assistant’ is well-versed in over 100 insurance products, including the product profile, insurance coverage, policy renewal, and claims settlement process, that are equipped with Waterdrop’s sophisticated data library. Based on its semantic understanding capability, ‘Waterdrop Assistant’ can recommend answers in real-time to our insurance service staff, allowing them to provide more timely and accurate responses to customers. During customer interactions, ‘Waterdrop Assistant’ detects and understands customer sentiment instantly and assists service staff in comforting customers at appropriate times, thereby improving user experience and satisfaction.
